That old apartment, euphemistically called ‘modern’—not as meaningfully modern as it is understood in comparison with a few others that were beginning to be greedily constructed in the vicinity, wiping away the spacious stillness of the place, cutting trees and threshing bushes out of their natural existence, and what have you—still stands today (as a tribute to mankind’s faith in the continuity of the human species in multitude, and Alwal was destined to bear the load, as it were) on a downward slope by the once-swamplands, calm as a quiet sanctuary, which may have seen better days back in the day when Capt. Roy, Mental Uncle, and other retired residents were alive and buzzing, pulling through life. However, loose, expired paint is peeling off its masonry walls, giving it a greasy, chalky façade, forgotten in a time and place that the earlier eras, which relied on their own cosmological reason to wheel forward relentlessly, will never come back to catch the lost way of life here: a subtle essence of reality, richer and more meaningful, that once lived with an excellent moral compass in the hearts and minds of its nostalgic families and their kindred friends and relatives, some of whom have, sadly, passed away, and some have moved on to someplace else. Nonetheless, some households, preferring to put down roots, continue to live with enduring, misty reminders of yesteryear, which once bore all the good times of their earlier lives. Today, the apartment is as old as anyone can recall; perhaps it dates to Alwal’s early urbanization efforts.
Today, that old place and time of the earlier generation, which took great care to ensure their children had better things than they had—especially morally and ethically, of good and bad—and which had always been a continuing reminder for their youth and now for their old age, their declining years as they are spoken of, has more or less vanished without a trace, but left behind a plenitude of teary-eyed, whimpering nostalgia that breaks the heart into a million splinters.
--∞--
The slowly vanishing swamplands on the far western side of this spaciously beautiful, breezy, and often very windy residential district, once cradling a quiet little no-name lake that existed beyond Capt. Roy’s apartment, are now gone, swallowed whole by a housing sprawl that stretched far into unseen lands, once beyond the reach of human society—or the old-timers who never ventured that far before; no one ever imagined those marshes and bogs could be developed or should ever be developed for housing or anything made by the pathetic touch of humankind. Nothing was left the way it was. Human settlement at the cost of environmental degradation has always been our tragic way of life.
--∞--
Capt. Roy and Mrs. Roy’s only daughter, Sangeeta, was already married (not-so-happily, it appeared so, as belatedly decoded by the concerned company of gracious ladies tied to the ladies-only kitty-party circle, but by then it was too late to help resurrect the holy matrimony that took place in the early ‘80s), and eventually made a home in Pune before being blessed with a daughter so jovial and loquacious that everybody began saying that she took after her granddaddy, Capt. Roy, the foodie patriarch of the Roy household.
Pinku, their only son, a non-foodie unlike his ‘Pops,’ Bapi, relocated from overseas to that city after their father, Capt. Roy, died in the mid- ‘90s. The family, now consisting only of Mrs. Roy, who had lived in that old apartment for years, haunted by memories of her deceased husband, decided to sell it after her children started living in Pune, without adding to her undetected stress or making her too personally invested. She finally decided: things would have to move on. Shortly after she sold their prized possession, their 2BHK flat, where they’d spent many memorable years before her husband’s death made it impossible for her to continue living there, she moved permanently to Pune with her son, his wife, and her only grandson. Sangeeta and her only daughter found it easier to look after Mrs. Roy there.
Three years have passed already since Mrs. Roy passed away in Pune, having survived her husband, Capt. Roy, who was undoubtedly the greatest foodie Alwal had ever known—for nearly three decades. Needless to say, she missed Alwal very much, especially her kitty parties. Her friends missed her equally. In Pune, however, she couldn’t stop thinking about her circle of homemakers, including the rapturous gentlewomen of their small ladies-only society: Mrs. Goswami, Chatterjee, Das, Saha, and Srivastava, who reluctantly moved to Varanasi in the early 2000s and regretted the decision within two years of their personally devastating relocation. But alas, the Srivastava family could not return to Alwal because relocation had left them physically unable, emotionally fatigued, and dampened in spirit due to their advancing age. So moving back to Alwal, where they felt they could have stayed on, became an unviable idea altogether. Before moving, Mrs. Srivastava had gifted Mrs. Chatterjee and others a jovial-looking ceramic Laughing Buddha. As it often happens, the Srivastava family has largely been forgotten: a clear instance of out of sight, out of mind. No one knows whether Mrs. Srivastava is aware of her beloved saheli, Mrs. Roy’s passing.
Mrs. Roy would pay a brief social visit to Arin’s house once a year, as well as finding dolorifuge in travelling solo to New Delhi, catching up with her relatives, mostly descendants of the astrophysicist Meghnad Saha (many times he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics but, thanks to Eurocentric biases and explicit prejudices, was never given, passed over), or other pilgrimage centres, such as Kashi, Vrindavan, Mathura, all in northern India, either during Durga Puja or Deepawali, recounting the olden days when Capt. Roy was alive and spent his days peacefully retired from the Army, never forgetting to dine lavishly on elaborate meals and encouraging friends and family to eat well and be happy, making life a full-blown celebration, he’d tell, until death did them part. Capt. Roy passed away long ago, sadly, with the fatal hurt of being forgotten. Death is inevitable; it will come someday.
Life, they say, moves on... It does, does it not? However, for Mrs. Roy, a new chapter had opened: living with emotional hooks and miseries tied to old memories of her departed foodie husband and an unchangeable past—all taken in stride as a normal part of her healing process. She was quite adept at this. Moving on was a possibility, and yet she took it reluctantly because she realized that the past is never really over: her husband’s memory cannot be erased; it must stay in the heart forever—until the day of reckoning. The heart never forgets. However, moving forward into the foreseeable future, while letting the unforgettable past safely stow away in the realms of yesteryear’s remembrances where it belongs, one cannot stop thinking about what went wrong or did not work—or what could have been—because no one needs to eradicate the past to move forward in life. Mrs. Roy could cope with her difficult life circumstances sagaciously, intuitively embracing their deeper meaning. This is how life is. Life is all about memories—good, bad, and unlovely.
Life is in the distant past; the present is especially a transitory unravelling of moments ticking by.
(End of Part 5 of 8)
(To be continued…)
(End of part XV)
By Arindam Moulick